Science, chronic fatigue syndrome, and me

I don’t often read papers in the journal Science; I usually find the titles incomprehensible. But in October last year BBC Radio 4’s Today programme alerted me to a Science paper reporting a highly significant association between a recently discovered retrovirus, xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV), and chronic fatigue syndrome.1 My initial response was one of scepticism: we have been here before with viral infections and the syndrome, and none has been proved, in the long run, to be causal. However, as a neurologist I see patients with this illness from time to time, so this was something I ought to find out more about. And since it was published in “the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary” (www.sciencemag.org/about/), with a high ranking 2009 impact factor of 28, surely there must be something in it?

I found the paper online and skimmed through it, encountering results (XMRV detected in DNA samples from 67% of patients with …